5 Options for Classroom Work in a Coaching Cycle, Ep. 167 Instructional Coaching with Ms. B

5 Options for Classroom Work in a Coaching Cycle, Ep. 167 Buzzing with Ms. B: The Coaching Podcast

Chrissy Beltran  00:01

Hey Coach, I know you’re out there hustling to get into classrooms and provide feedback that actually improve instruction. But meeting your teachers needs when you’re looking at a stack of sticky notes is just about impossible. I want to share a coaching tool that I know you’ll love. Digicoach is an app you can use on your phone designed for busy coaches like you and your administrators to it’s the perfect way to record your observations and notes when you visit a classroom. Collect data about what’s going on at your school and differentiate your coaching support based on the patterns you see. Some of my favorite features include the reports, and digit coaches pre written strategies and coaching tips to provide specific feedback and help in those moments when you just don’t know what to say. Ready to check it out and make your workload so much lighter, head to digicoach.com And tell them miss be sent you to try it out for free and provide actionable feedback to your teachers. At the law literacy coach at an elementary school, I spent so much time trying to find the perfect supplemental resources for my teachers. That’s why I am so excited to share a special resource with you today. Decodable texts are essential for our students who are working on mastering phonics in primary grades especially, I have come across the sweetest decodable books that I love and my kindergarten daughter loves them too. They’re called Express readers. Each book has a complete storyline includes fun and funny characters like bug and duck. And the stories are engaging and increasing complexity over time as to the words and sentence structures on each page. Sticky words are identified in each book to help children with words they aren’t able to decode yet, or those with irregular spelling patterns. There’s a perfect resource for giving students at your school the practice they need and applying phonics skills, head to express readers.org and visit the Decodable Books page. There you can download a quick keys guide with teaching tips for each book, including teaching sticky word mapping, you can also get free sample decodable sent to your address, head to express readers.org If you’re building your phonics instruction, and you’re ready for some really great readers

Chrissy Beltran  02:10

you’re listening to buzzing with Miss B the coaching podcast where we believe that every teacher deserves a coach, and every coach does too. I’m Chrissy Beltran, an instructional coach, resource creator and coffee enthusiast, and I’m your host, stay tuned for practical tips and honest coaching talk that will help you coach with confidence.

Chrissy Beltran  02:34

Hey, coach, and welcome to episode 167. Five options for classroom work in a coaching cycle. This is one of the episodes in my mum’s all about coaching cycles. And I’m excited to share this with you because I feel like we get really stuck in terms of what coaching cycles can look like. And this might help you think creatively about how to solve some of the problems that you’re having with certain teachers. I would love to hear from you about the podcast and what you want to hear next year. So I want you to head to buzzing with mfi.com/survey, you can complete the survey there and you will be entered to win a $25 gift card from Amazon. If you do that by the end of December. It’d be nice little bonus money for December. And so what I want is to know from you what you want to hear on the podcast next year, if you’re like a avid listener, if you listen to these episodes all the time, it is time to tell me what you think what you love, what what you don’t love, and what you want to hear next year, who you want to hear from and what topics would make the biggest impact on you as a coach. So like I said, in, we’re in the middle of our series about coaching cycles and making them work for you, because sometimes we get really hung up on Oh, coaching cycles have to be done this way. But in reality, we can make them work for the people that we serve. I’m all about differentiating coaching and supporting teachers with strategies that are meaningful to them in the moment. And so I think that this is going to help you think about what strategy is going to be meaningful for my teacher, right now to make the biggest impact. You can learn about coaching cycles in module five of the confident literacy coach. So if you’re a member, be sure to dig into that module to get all of the details about your pre conference, a few different types of coaching classroom work, and your post conference. So also, you can join instructional coaching with Miss B, the Facebook group. And so it’s coaching cycle mums in the group. And you can join us there to get all the details about coaching cycles. And you’ll be sure to answer the membership questions so I can add you in because sometimes people try to drink without answering them and I can’t add them in. So let’s talk a little bit about coaching cycles and what the standard model is. Okay, we’re gonna simplify it because I don’t want to overwhelm you with too much information. It doesn’t have to be complicated. And sometimes we make it really complicated. Episode Three is a coaching cycle in six easy steps episodes. So I’m not going to dig into like every step at you know, what is it ad nauseam? I’m just going to focus on the kinds of classroom work you do but I’m gonna give you an overview of the cycle first. We don’t want to overwhelm ourselves or our teachers by putting too much pressure on how long it’s going to take. So I was talking with somebody once about what their plan was for working with their teachers this year. And their plan was to enroll each teacher in six week coaching cycles. And I just at the time, I thought, well, maybe that’s how their school does it. But in reality, like, the farther away I got from that, I thought that is just really overwhelming to teachers and to the coach. And I don’t really see how it’s always realistic, given the nature of schools, and how much change happens in schools, and how we had to be super flexible. I feel like putting really rigid parameters on a coaching cycle is a recipe for failure. So instead, we had to think about how do we make this work for us. And the point of coaching cycles isn’t to a fix a teacher to set them up for the rest of their year, right. Or for the rest of their career, that’s very overwhelming, we want to focus on one specific thing. And in keeping with that idea, we can use very short coaching cycles to be very impactful, we just need to differentiate our coaching support to reflect teachers needs. So the support that goes in the middle of that cycle looks different. Depending on your teacher, you can actually grab a free download at buzzing with msp.com/episode 167. And that download includes some tips and ideas for coaching cycle engagement, how to get your teachers excited about cycles. So this is a basically, this is a basic, basically, this is a basic introduction to coaching cycles. In a coach coaching cycle, you pretty much have three pieces, okay? The first piece is usually a pre conference, in a pre conference, you show up prepared for your session with a teacher, you look over the curriculum, and you consider possible resources. And then you make a plan together as to what they’re going to work on with their students, you can ask the teacher to come with student work samples or data. So you can think about lesson planning and with that sort of frame of reference. And you can also ask the teacher to think about what they are interested in, working on beforehand. So they show up, possibly with an idea of what they want to work with you on. You may have already had this conversation in the hallway, it may have been oh, I want to try that idea out. I just don’t know how to go about it. Hey, don’t worry, I’ll show up in your class on Tuesday at you know, at 668. During your conference time, you may have also had a conversation at the end of a PD in where the teacher says, you say okay, well what’s one thing that you can commit to, and they say, I can commit to, you know, trying out one of these lessons in the next two weeks, and then they put it on a sticky note and give it to you. So that tells you what they’re going to work on. And then you show up to actually help them make the plan. Complaints are also another great way to figure out what teachers need to work on or want to work on. So if they say none of my kids can do this, all of my kids are struggling in this, you say hey, I would love to help you with that. And then you show up and help them. So that pre conference you are you’re kind of making a plan for what the instruction is going to look like during this coaching cycle. And you can have a planning format, something simple that you’re going to use to align your work with the teachers. At this time, you’re going to choose the mode of coaching support. And I’m going to get into five different options for that in just a little bit. Okay, you’re going to plan together usually for what that support can look like you can provide them with a note taker, you can provide them with a lesson plan guide that you’re going to use if you’re modeling, basically you’re setting themselves up them set them up for success in terms of the classroom work is the classroom work is where they’re going to see something and have to make a change in their brains in order to try something new on their own later. After you have your pre conference, we’re going to move into classroom work. So in your classroom work, if you have five different choices, and we’re going to dig into what those five choices are in just a bit. After the classroom work, you’re going to have the third, the third step is debriefing and reflection. So in this section, you’re going to have a little meeting, you can do this in person, if you must, if you’re unable to do it any other way. But technology, I have an episode a couple episodes back, that are about different ways to have coaching cycles without as many meetings so you can listen to that episode for some ideas. Basically, you’re going to provide some feedback and do some questioning with teachers to help them think through what they’ve learned and what they saw during that classroom work. So you’re helping them think through their delivery, the outcome of their choices, you’re helping them think through what they saw in a classroom visit, and kind of how they can apply that learning to their teaching and what the outcome could be. In the course the confident literacy coach, I actually teach a five step process for this which is connection, question reflection, direction and preparation. We connect with them. First, we question their thinking and help them think differently about something we help them reflect on something that they’re currently doing. We may have to give direction or support them in implementing that into their own teaching what that would look like and then we help them prepare for the next step of their learning. So those are the three main parts of a coaching cycle, the pre conference where we get prepared to do the work together, the classroom work where we do the work together, and then the debriefing and reflection where we think back to how it went, and how we can use that to impact future teaching. Now we’re going to dig into your five different choices for classroom work, because I think we get stuck at three. And I usually teach about three. But I wanted to add two more, because I think they are equally valuable. The first choice that you have for classroom work is a pretty standard choice, and it is modeling, modeling, I dig into an episode five, your modeling career. And it is whenever you go into the classroom to teach a lesson and show one way that lesson could be done. And to think aloud to help the teacher see why you’re making the decisions that you’re making and how you know to do what it is that you’re doing. I recommend that you plan together really well during your pre conference for a model lesson. And that whenever you teach you stick to your plan, but you demonstrate how you know to make those small adjustments that we make is as teachers in life teaching. You can also introduce a simple management plan to students if there is not one in place. Or you can have the teacher handle management depending on what the purpose of your lesson is. And that is a conversation that needs to happen during pre conference. And during the lesson. Prior to the lesson, you need to identify what roles each person will serve during the lesson. So then during the lesson, if a teacher is not kind of following through with that role in terms of they’re supposed to observe, take notes, things like that, we may have to remind them of that fact. But hopefully you won’t have to because you’ve identified prior to the lesson, this is what’s going to happen. That’s the first type of classroom we’re modeling. The second type is observing. Now coaches can’t always use this language. Whenever I was a coach, I could not use the word observation or observe because that was tied to formal evaluations, it was considered a value of language, even though observe literally just means look at something and see what you say. So because it was tied to, you know, formal observations, I couldn’t use that work. But I did say I can watch you teach and give you some feedback.

Chrissy Beltran  12:08

So four observations you can plan together first, if that would help the teacher and it probably will help you as well to make sure you’re getting the most out of your observation. You want to limit your input during an observation planning session and serve as a sounding board or to remind the teacher of things that you’ve discussed when it becomes necessary. So that you are making sure that you’re the teacher actually understands what to do during their lesson and that you’re able to give them feedback on what they’re doing. You can kind of put yourself in a place that’s not disruptive to students, but you also can be maybe one of the kids in the group, if that needs to be the case. I mean, you as kids are working on something, you may sit with them and kind of talk to them and just see what they’re doing. And try not to interrupt but learn a little bit about what they’re thinking as they’re doing their activities. And I would if I were you, I would use the same kind of note taker or observation guide that you provided to would provide to a teacher if they were going to observe somebody else. And then you will look for the things that you specifically planned, you want to make sure that you have a focus for your observation. So if a teacher says I’m struggling with questioning, if a teacher says I’m struggling with grouping, and I’m not sure how to make sure that my groups work together, that’s what you’re looking for. So you can give them feedback on that thing. Okay, another mode of instead of of classroom work that you might not have considered is a classroom visit, then a classroom visit, we actually have a teacher, visit another classroom to learn about something. So this is how it works. You put you do your pre conference with a teacher and you identify something they want to work on. And then together, you talk about how they could go about working on that thing. And one of the options you can provide is a classroom visit where that teacher will go visit a colleague, some people call them learning walks, some column colleague visits, it’s just, it’s all the same thing. They’re gonna go visit another classroom, and they are going to learn something from that classroom. So you identify specifically what they want to learn. And then you as a coach has hopefully been in lots of classrooms at your school, and you can recommend a great classroom to visit, you can say, I’m going to talk to a couple teachers so we can get this set up for you. You go talk to that teacher, that host teacher who could model that lesson and show another teacher how they do something in their classroom. You say, Hey, is it okay? If this teacher comes to watch your lesson? I feel like you have a real strength in this area. And I think that it would be helpful for others to see how you do it so they can apply that in their own rooms. I haven’t been turned down. Some teachers were hesitant. They were a little bit like, I don’t know about somebody coming in, but then they would usually feel pretty good about having been asked in the first place. And they say yes. Yeah, what you’ll do is you’ll help that teacher prepare, make sure that they have something set up ready that this other teacher shouldn’t see. And then from there, you go back to your original teacher that you’re coaching and you say okay, we are set up. We can do it on this day at time. I have coverage for Ready for your class? Or would you be willing to go during your conference time, or I can set up a time for your class to go to a lesson in the library or the coordinate the technology coordinator, something like that. So then you ideally will go with the teacher to visit this other classroom. And you will sit there with them, observe the lesson, take your own notes as well, and then come back so you can debrief with them. You can also set up a time where the teachers can talk together, because I know my teachers really appreciated being able to ask questions of the host teacher, and then the host teacher says, Oh, sure, I’ll send that to you. Oh, yeah. And they’re really usually very gracious. You can provide visiting teachers with an observation guide, you’re gonna use the same one, I actually have one of my PLC forms learning together guide. If you go to buzzing with Miss p.com, you can search for PLC forms, and the learning together forms have a colleague visit guide that you could use to have a colleague visit another colleague, and kind of get an idea of what their thoughts are. And you can use the same one. Whenever you debrief, you want to make sure that we are thinking about how is this learning going to be impacting your classroom, it doesn’t always mean that the teacher is going to say, Oh, I learned to do this. So I’m going to do that exact thing. It could be I saw this and I liked it. I liked this piece of it. I’m thinking what if I did it in this way, it just it can kind of spur some thinking because teachers can see things done different ways that maybe they were stuck in their own little teaching bubble, which happens to us if we don’t see other classrooms. And this can give them a different perspective on something. So we do want to expose them to other teaching models. The fourth different way that one of the fourth way that you can support teachers during the coaching cycle is co teaching, I dig into co teaching in Episode Six. My biggest tips for co teaching is make sure that when you plan together, you plan everything. So in that pre conference, you want to make sure that for every piece of the lesson, you know what you’re doing, and they know what they’re doing. And it should never be I’m doing this and you’re sitting around, you’re doing this and I’m sitting around, that’s not really co teaching that’s kind of like taking turns. Instead, we could have one teacher introduce expectations for the lesson. The other teacher could notice when the students are following expectations and provide praise points. We could have one teacher read a lot of text and pause at appropriate places. And the other teacher can think aloud using the strategy that is being taught. We want to see two teachers in action, adding their expertise to the lesson. And then after the co teaching event actually happens, you will sit you will discuss and you will talk about what that teacher is going to implement into their teaching and how that lesson hopefully impacted the way that they think about something. My last option for coaching cycle classroom work is video coaching. In Episode 79, I talk with Corey camp of Sydney and we dig into video coaching and how you use it well. So basically what happens is that you have your pre conference, you set up your maybe you have a lesson plan, you plan together, you talk about what the focus is going to be and what you’re going to look for when you watch the lesson, the teacher teaches the lesson and records themselves teaching, they may aim the camera only at them if they are not supposed to get students on camera for any reason, you may have permission to get students on camera, and then you just have to put the video in a secure spot. So everybody in the world can’t access it. But the teacher will record them it can it can be on their phone, it does not have to be anything fancy, then you watch the video, and it’s really a helpful thing to kind of watch the video separately, they watch it, you watch it, you each make notes. And then you come together and discuss and you can have the video, you know loaded up. So you just kind of discuss at certain points throughout. And you can say, Okay, this is a little this is something I’ve noticed here. I wonder if you notice anything at this point as well. You can talk about those specific things and debrief and talk about how the teacher is going to use what they got out of that lesson to impact their own teaching. That’s the fifth form of of classroom work during a coaching cycle that I think is super impactful that sometimes we forget, all these five modes are highly impactful. And we see huge change happen in classrooms after we do one of these things. Usually, that doesn’t mean each one is going to be equally impactful for each teacher we have to differentiate based on teachers needs. So if a teacher is just struggling to envision, but they’re willing to try something, maybe modeling would work really well. If a teacher is struggling to envision what something could look like and they are not super willing to try things, maybe visiting a classroom where video coaching so that they can see some areas that maybe they would like to change. If they would like some support in teaching something that they feel like they want to try it as well and they don’t want to just watch. co teaching could be a great model. We need to respond to the teachers needs and how they talk about their teaching to make sure that our support actually supports them in the moment. I always ask at the end of each episode, what my guests favorite thing is. And so I have to tell you my favorite thing. My current favorite thing is not shockingly, pumpkins and scented candles. I put up my little fall decorations, I have leaves and pumpkins and everywhere My husband was like what happened in here, and inside my house, I’m pretending that it’s fall even though outside it is not super foolish. It is pretty warm. But inside it’s nice and cozy. I have a pumpkin scented candles, I have leaves all over the place and little pumpkins. And so right now my favorite thing is to light a candle, make myself a cup of coffee and a fall themed mug. And like just be cozy in my home regardless of what I’m working on. So that is my favorite thing right now. I do want to make sure that you go grab that free download at buzzing with Miss b.com slash episode 167 the shownotes through there, you can get all the details that you need. And you can get any links that are relevant to this episode as well. Like if you’re like, oh, I want to listen to that episode you mentioned go to that go to the show notes doesn’t wanna miss b.com/episode 168 All the links will be there and you can click and go. And you can also grab that free download about three different ways that you can get teachers engaged in coaching cycles doesn’t really buzzing withmsb.com/Episode 168 Next week, we are answering your coaching cycle questions. I say we I don’t know why it’s just me here on this microphone. You’ve asked so many great questions about how to make coaching cycles work and talked about the challenges that you have. But I wanted to have a special episode where we really dig into them and get them answered. That’s going to be episode 168. And until then, happy coaching!

Chrissy Beltran  21:48

Thank you for listening to buzzing with Miss bee the coaching podcast. Want more coaching ideas? Check me out at buzzing with Miss b.com and on Instagram at buzzing with Miss B. If you love the show, share it with a coach who would love it too. Or leave me a review on iTunes. It’s free and it helps others find this show. Happy coaching!